Last Christmas my brother bought me a set of the ‘Big 6’ clearwing moth pheromone lures. Clearwing moths are an elusive and scarce group of day-flying moths that aren’t drawn to the light of a moth trap and stay very much under the human radar. But, in the last twenty years or so, synthetic pheromone lures have been developed to attract them and this has been transforming our understanding of their population sizes and distribution.

Dave and | had only ever come across one of these clearwing moths before. It was a red-tipped clearwing, seen back in 2018 at the Wheatfen Broad reserve in Norfolk:

I was totally mesmerised by the exotic-looking little thing. But this was on an amazing nature reserve in Norfolk and could I really dare to hope that there were also clearwings flying here in the meadows in Kent? We had certainly never seen one.

This week I took the lures out of the freezer where they need to be kept:

After doing some research into flight seasons and larval food plants, I decided to give the orange-tailed, yellow-legged and currant clearwing lures a go as a test run this week.

The Christmas present also included three specialised traps to hold the pheromone lures. The orange-tailed clearwing lays her eggs mainly on wayfarer trees and in the past decade we have planted many of these here in the meadows. I hung the first trap next to a small copse of mixed wayfarer and guelder rose bushes:

The yellow-legged clearwing, however, likes oaks – mainly pedunculate but also other oaks including holm oaks. So the second trap hung in a pedunculate oak tree which is also right next to a holm oak:

The placement of the third trap was easy because the currant clearwing lays her eggs on blackcurrants and we have several of these busily producing fruit for summer puddings in the allotment:

I really wasn’t expecting anything to come of this test run, and so I was actually jumping with excitement when we inspected the traps a short while later and found a clearwing in one of them:

It was in the trap hanging in the oak tree that contained the lure for yellow-legged clearwings. It was therefore a bit of a surprise to find that this was not a yellow-legged clearwing at all, but was in fact an orange-tailed clearwing. What a thing of beauty it is – the orange tail at the end of a narrow abdomen is quite extraordinary

Once I had photographed the moth, I released it in the same place and brought that trap in so that I didn’t catch it again. We continued to check the other traps and were delighted to also get a currant clearwing in the trap near the blackcurrants:

After the unexpected success of the clearwing test run, I have done additional research and now know a lot more about clearwings and how to most effectively lure them with the pheromones. I wonder if we will manage to see any more species before the end of the summer?

The addition of the two clearwing species to the meadows moth list is indisputably one of my wildlife highlights of the year. Another high point, though, has been the successful treatment of a pair of foxes with mange using arsen sulphur. These two foxes have cubs this spring which made it especially important to get them better. In an earlier post I included before and after photos showing how the male’s fur was growing back:

I have now had a chance to get a better look at the vixen. Here she was in late March just as I was starting the six-week course:

Now, with a big sigh of relief, I can include a photo from this week to show how much better she is, with fur reappearing where it had been lost:

The treatment was made much easier by the fact that the two of them were model patients, turning up every evening without fail for their sandwiches sprinkled with the arsen sulphur that I was serving with the peanuts at dusk.

There has not been much rain this spring and early summer, and earthworms have been difficult to get at. Consequently the badgers too have been extremely interested in the nightly peanuts and are often waiting for me out in the open. Never before have I been able to photograph them as easily as this:

This is the mother of the cubs as you can tell by her tummy:

And here she is again, out with her cubs at night on a trail camera:

The song thrushes would ideally also be collecting worms at the moment and no doubt they have a nest full of hungry mouths to feed. But, in dry periods when the ground is hard, they have an alternative food source to keep their family fed:

Back in the meadows we haven’t seen much of the kestrels so far this year but this one has caught herself a lizard:

And it has been a long while since a barn owl was last seen here:

Several pairs of starlings have been nesting in the meadows this spring, and the young from their first broods have now fledged:

Adult starlings feed their chicks a protein-rich diet of invertebrates. But, since earthworms have been hard to come by, this will have comprised of beetles, caterpillars, spiders and other such grubs. I was also surprised at how many photos I have had this week of starlings with butterflies or moths in their beaks:

The four butterfly banks in the meadows are at their most fabulous in June:

One of them is heavily covered in kidney vetch this year, a plant that is adored by many species of butterfly:

Sainfoin is a beautiful plant with a beautiful name, and is a complete bee magnet:

And a few pyramidal orchids have now arrived in the meadows:

I ran the moth trap in the wood one night this week and got a big haul of moths, adding nearly forty species to the wood moth list. I think this scorched wing moth was my favourite:

One of the many joys of mothing is exploring the imaginative English names given to the moths by entomologists from earlier centuries. Clockwise from top left we have clouded border, green oak tortrix, fern, pretty chalk carpet, mocha and satin lutestring:

The wider wood has a population of buzzards and, although they don’t nest in our wood, they are often to be seen there, especially using the water in the summer. A buzzard arrived to find this shallow dish unfortunately dry…

…but there is always water available in the deeper pools for these magnificent birds:

It appears that, no sooner had the tawny owls finished with the nest box and moved out, than the stock doves have moved in:

Returning to the meadows, for quite a few years now we have been trying to establish a swift colony here but it has been a very slow process indeed. The good news is that the sole bird in box 3 has now found itself a mate:

There is another pair of birds in box 5, but an egg is yet to be laid in either box. Last year the first egg was laid on 22nd May, so things this year are already over a fortnight behind. This delay will inevitably be putting back when the chicks fledge and they can leave for Africa at the end of the summer. I do hope that both pairs get going soon so that they will be ready to leave with the rest of the swifts, migrating in a group rather than on their own.

We have returned from the Isles of Scilly to find the meadows bathed in a brilliant white. In all the years we have been here, there has never been such a magnificent show of oxeye daisies:

Perhaps some might think that this concentration of these large plants will be swamping other things out, but these are beautiful native plants and are offering up an immense amount of pollen, so it’s difficult to be too cross with them.

We set out to discover what invertebrates are making use of this completely overwhelming number of flowers:

Painted lady butterflies certainly seem to love them. These butterflies are long-distance migrants, starting out from North Africa and the Middle East in the early spring each year. From there they spread across Europe in a multi-generational migration, since each individual only lives a few weeks, and they arrive in Britain from May onwards. In the autumn they start heading south again and return to their starting point, completing a 9,000 mile circuit. Lots of them have arrived in the meadows already and can be seen dancing amongst the daisies:

All sorts of beetle gorge on the vast amount of pollen produced by the flowers:

We also saw swollen-thighed beetles (Oedemera nobilis), malachite beetles (Malachius bipustulatus) and lots of tiny beetles that are so minuscule and covered in pollen that I feel I have no chance of identifying them:

But what we will remember most about this enjoyable search amongst the daisies are the spiders. The common crab spider, Xysticus cristata, is an ambush predator that waits for something to land on the flower and then pounces on it.

It was only when I loaded this photo onto my computer and had a proper look at it that I saw that her prey was another spider. In fact, it is actually a male of the same species that she is eating:

I don’t know whether he had just mated with her and no longer served any purpose other than as a meal, or perhaps he had tried to court her but she wasn’t impressed. Either way it did not end well for him. This spring I have been trying to understand spiders a bit more so that I can get to like them, but they don’t do themselves any favours with this sort of behaviour.

This is another spider that lies in wait for visitors to the flower. She stays stock still with her long legs spread out and ready for immediate action:

Below is the male of the species, smaller and with brown markings but with the same really long first pair of legs:

I had never seen this next spider before but I knew what it was the instant I spotted it. It’s the cricket bat spider (Mangora acalypha):

I really enjoyed this week’s oxeye daisy project, although I now have the yellow and white flowers imprinted on my retinas.

It was pleasing to get a photo of this furry hoverfly in the meadows this week. He’s trying really hard to look like a white-tailed bumblebee, but he plopped himself down onto this leaf in a most un-bee like manner which is what caught my attention. He also has big fly-eyes, only a single set of wings and short, wispy antennae:

This is the bumblebee mimic hoverfly, Volucella bombylans (var plumata), and he is imitating a stinging white-tailed bumblebee to avoid bird predation. The female hoverfly also uses this disguise to trick her way into a bumblebee nest to lay her eggs, although she will also use social wasp nests. The hoverfly larvae then live off the detritus at the bottom of the nest, as well as occasionally also eating the bee or wasp larvae.

Our precious colony of small blue butterflies has now emerged and there is a lot of kidney vetch around to support them this summer:

Mating small heaths using a daisy as their platform:

The 22-spot ladybird is also very small at only 3-5mm and it eats the mildew on a variety of plants:

While we were away we had an unusual visitor to the meadows:

As the bird flew off the perch, you can also make out its red trousers:

Here is a much better photo of the bird from Wiki Commons:

This bird will probably have migrated back to the UK along with the swifts, using them as a mobile larder. Now that it has arrived back in the UK, it will switch from eating swifts to acrobatically catching dragonflies midair in its claws.

I am pleased to say that the three swifts that we were expecting back have avoided the attentions of the hobby and all have arrived in their boxes.

I have numbered to boxes that we now have up on the side of the house in the photo below:

Box 3 is the most successful with four young swifts fledging from it over the last couple of years. But last summer there was unfortunately only a single parent bringing them up. This bird arrived back in the box on 8th May this year:

Having arrived, the swift then disappeared for a few days, returned for a night, went off for another few days and then, overnight on on 20th May, there were two of them:

But my celebration was short lived because that was just for one night. We are now back to there being just one swift in the box each night. The bird has removed all the old bedding and the box is now bare. Some of the ejected nest material has got caught on spider webbing in front of the camera and created the white splodge.

There wasn’t a camera in box 5 last year but we know that the pair of swifts had claimed it and were roosting in there every night. Over the winter, when the birds were away, Dave installed a camera in the box and we can now see that both birds have successfully returned:

The hobby timed its arrival perfectly because dragonflies are now emerging from the ponds:

There are also lots of damselflies around the ponds but I shouldn’t imagine a hobby would bother with these:

It has been so very dry which are difficult conditions for the badgers who are trying to eat worms. Nevertheless, they are doing what they can.

A little foraging group out and about, cub leading the way:

The remains of a bumblebee nest that they dug out one night to get at the grubs:

Over in the wood, the owl excitement is over for another year and all four tawny owl chicks fledged on 11th May. Earlier on that day, the adult seemed to be encouraging them out of the box:

Then, at around 4pm, one of the chicks launched itself from the box and can be seen in the bottom right below:

Most unfortunately, the main camera looking at the box wasn’t in quite the right position and this is the best it managed of this exciting event:

Again around 4pm, another of the chicks scrabbled up the tree. It would have then hidden itself further up while the parents continued to bring it food.

But after 4pm on 11th there has been minimal activity at the box, indicating that all the chicks left around the same time. So that’s it for another year, but I do so hope they choose to nest there again next year.

We were very pleased with how many tadpoles were wriggling around in the pond in the marjoram clearing. However, we weren’t the only ones to notice them. Unfortunately a pair of crows have systematically fished them all out and we can no longer see any at all.

I finish today with a little group of four great tits that I presume have recently fledged. John the bird ringer has been on a mission this spring to ring all the baby blue tits and great tits that are being raised in the bird and dormice boxes. This project has just finished with a total of 117 blue tit and 20 great tit chicks being ringed.

When he puts his nets up later in the year it will be really interesting to see what percentage of the tits being caught fledged from the boxes this spring.

It was an alarmingly wet and windy forecast for the week of our family holiday to the Isles of Scilly. This was definitely not what we had been hoping for, but in the end the weather was much better than predicted and we only got wet on one day. The wind, however, meant that the seal snorkelling we had booked was cancelled and we were unable to take any wildlife boat trips.

Some of us caught the small plane over to the Scillies from Newquay, but most of us either drove or caught the sleeper train down to Penzance and travelled over on the Scillonian:

It was indeed a very rough crossing out but at least we got to enjoy Lizzie’s seasickness glasses:

We were staying on Tresco, an island where twenty red squirrels were reintroduced in 2013 and have since thrived with the population now growing to more than a hundred:

The Gulf Stream creates a mild, generally frost-free climate on the Islands, allowing a wonderful variety of succulents to grow:

And Echiums were everywhere:

I did, however, notice that there weren’t the numbers and variety of invertebrates around that we would be seeing at home at this time of year. We were pleased to see this very large and hairy grass eggar moth caterpillar on Bryher though:

It was also nice to see black oil beetles, Meloe proscarabaeus, both on Bryher and on Tresco:

Green tiger beetles were also seen in the heathy area to the north of Tresco:

On 9th January this year, Storm Goretti hit the islands hard, with wind speeds of 99mph recorded at St Mary’s airport. The resulting damage from the storm was still very much in evidence:

We were keeping a group bird list and together we saw 37 species over the course of the week, although no doubt we would have done much better had we been able to go on some wildlife boat trips. There were certainly many more song thrush, blackbirds and house sparrows about than we would normally see:

And wherever the habitat got heathy, there were plenty of stonechat:

Tresco also has feral populations of both Lady Amherst’s and Golden pheasants:

Dave has always loved to poke around in rock pools and his children consequently knew how to sex a crab and other such matters from a very early age:

This week he had the opportunity to start again with the next generation:

I hadn’t seen a swimming crab before. The fifth pair of legs in these crabs from the Portunidae family are flattened into paddles allowing them to swim:

A shanny, Blennius pholis, is a fish of the rocks and stones of the lower shore:

Epitonium clathrus, the common wentletrap:

Tresco is separated from the neighbouring island of Bryher by a narrow strait of water:

But on one day of the holiday the tide was low enough to allow us to walk across to Bryher:

However, the tide was not quite low enough for us to keep our feet completely dry all the way across:

On a previous visit to the islands there was a super-low tide, allowing us to walk from Tresco across to the uninhabited island of Samson which was very memorable indeed.

Staying on Tresco worked very well with our large family group of sixteen since, as well as the long sandy beaches, it has swimming pools, a spa, a well-stocked supermarket, bike hire and several cafes and restaurants. It also had the subtropical Abbey Gardens to admire:

Scilly’s rocky shores have long been treacherous and over the years there have been hundreds of wrecks. The Abbey Gardens has a collection of 19th century figureheads that once belonged to merchant sailing ships or early steam vessels that were lost on the rocks around the Isles of Scilly.

The daymark on St Martin’s Head is a 36ft high granite pillar that has stood there since 1683 and is used for navigation. On a good day it can be seen from the Cornish coast.

In 1830 the Hope was wrecked on St Martin’s Head when the captain mistook the daymark, which was painted entirely white at the time, for the white lighthouse on the island of St Agnes. An unknown West African boy was drowned and is buried in the graveyard on St Martins.

As a result of the wrecking of the Hope, red stripes were painted onto the daymark to distinguish it from the white St Agnes lighthouse.

The Scilly Islands are not so very far off the coast of Britain but are set in rough seas. From early November until mid-March, when the Scillonian and all the scheduled inter-island boats stop running, things must feel very different there. One of our group was talking to an islander who said that, at one point last winter, no freight reached the islands for five weeks and this included delivery of fresh food into the supermarkets.

All around are signs of isolated island life:

I finish with a photo of the magnificent flower arrangement in Tresco church, all cut from plants growing wild on the island:

This was our third visit to the Scillies, the previous two being in October when the islands are packed with birdwatchers twitching for unusual migrating birds. That was quite exciting, but it was also so lovely to see the islands in flower in May. We are already pretty certain that we will be visiting again someday soon.

I would like to introduce you to a handsome friend of mine:

He is one of the pair of foxes who are waiting each evening for me as I put out some peanuts. A fortnight ago I finished treating them both for mange with a six-week course of arsen sulphur sprinkled onto sandwiches.

Here he is on 29th March:

And how completely and utterly pleasing it is to see him now:

The vixen’s mange was a lot worse than his but she is also much shyer and I have not been able to have a good look at her recently. However, as far as I can tell, she hasn’t deteriorated further in the last few weeks so I am hoping that she too is getting better. It is especially important to have been able to help them because they have cubs this spring.

Sadly this is not how I wanted to see my first fox cub of the year, lying cold and stiff in the meadows one morning with no obvious sign of what the problem was:

The badgers are also waiting out in the open for the peanuts at the moment, but only when they don’t realise that I’ve arrived. As soon as they get any indication that I am there with them, they shoot away into the undergrowth:

It’s good to be able to get photos of them on my camera though.

On Friday evening we met up with a couple of fellow volunteer wildlife team members and attempted to do a bat survey of Walmer Castle grounds:

We certainly heard a lot of bats on our Magenta bat detectors and saw quite a few too, especially over the Queen Mother’s pond, but we struggled to identify individual species with our basic equipment. There were a good many bats of several species feeding in the castle grounds but we currently cannot say more than that!

But the highlight of the evening was not bat-related at all. Dave spotted a tawny owl nest with two fluffy chicks in a tree hole:

We got home at around 10pm and one last check of the swift box cameras before bed revealed that a swift had returned and was spending the night in the box:

The swift looking out of the box early the next morning:

However, the swift then left the box and has not yet returned. It was just a single parent that successfully reared two chicks to fledging in this box last summer, so maybe this bird has now had to go off to find a new partner. It will be interesting to see how our infant swift colony does this year, but it doesn’t seem to be getting off to a very strong start.

Elsewhere in the meadows, it is always good to see a kestrel:

And broad-bodied chaser dragonflies are now on the wing:

We have actually had a bit of a batty week because there was a nice photo of a brown long-eared bat over in the wood:

Following the successful ringing of four tawny owl chicks in that same owl box last week, the young birds have now begun to appear on the camera:

When John removed the chicks from the box last week in order to ring them, he took a photo of the inside of the box. We had completely cleared this box out in mid February, but there has been a lot going on in there since then. The floor certainly tells that story:

The adult owls have been working really hard keeping their four chicks so well fed and deserve a bit of a rest and a drink by this shallow pool:

I don’t know where the buzzards are nesting this year – certainly not in our wood, but there is a large area of woodland in the vicinity with substantial mature trees that would suit them:

It was again a group of four of us that went round the dormouse boxes for May’s monitoring tour. John the bird ringer is interested in all the blue tit chicks that are being reared in both the dormice boxes and the bird boxes in the wood this spring. He is trying to ring as many of them as he can and then, when he puts his nets up later on in the year, he will be curious to see what percentage of the young blue tits he catches have fledged from the boxes.

Fourteen of the thirty boxes have had blue tits nesting in them this spring. Of these, three of the nests have failed:

This time four of the boxes contained young blue tits of the right size and he ringed thirty-nine chicks.

We also found eleven dormice on this month’s tour:

The highlight was definitely box 12 which contained three torpid dormice all cuddled in together:

Very sweet indeed.

I was in Maidenhead for a few days recently, and have a lovely routine when there of visiting Spade Oak nature reserve near Marlow with a friend to see what’s about. This time we saw several families of Canada geese. The posture of the adult geese when swimming with their chicks was interesting:

Canada geese often lower their necks and flatten their bodies against the water when swimming with their chicks and apparently this behaviour is called either ‘alligatoring’ or ‘stealth mode’.

It is suggested that it is both to look aggressive, warning potential predators to stay away, and perhaps also as camouflage to try to avoid attention whilst moving their goslings across the water – although I do not find this second explanation very convincing.

It has been a busy few weeks and I see that we are already nearly half way through May. Whilst every month has something to offer, it is May in particular when I would like to slow time down and fully savour every day. But there are still over two weeks of it to go and I will try to make the most of them…

Something rather special has been going on in the wood this spring because a pair of tawny owls have chosen to nest in one of the owl boxes:

For several weeks now the male owl has been bringing prey to the box by night. The incoming rodents are mostly carried in the bird’s beak, leaving his feet free to land on the box:

Although sometimes he carries them in his talons instead:

Whilst the two rodents above are mice, the photos below are of a vole and a rat that are also being caught:

And no doubt dormice as well but it’s hard to tell in the dark. It is asking a lot of the male to catch enough prey to feed his entire family.

These night time arrivals were going on throughout the 28-30 days that the female was incubating the eggs, and are carrying on still to feed both the chicks and the female since she continues to spend much time in the box. This week, though, there has been a big change in behaviour because she is now sitting for long periods in the entrance to the box. Mostly awake…

..but sometimes asleep:

Her eyes are the deep, black pools of a nocturnal animal:

I have been reporting what has been going on at the box to John, the bird ringer, who will be acting under licence to ring the chicks. He has also taken advice from experts who regularly ring tawny owls here in East Kent. As a result of all this information, the decision was taken to look in the box this afternoon:

The normal number of chicks for tawny owls is two or three and so it was very surprising to find four chicks in the box. Thankfully there was no adult in the box, but there was one watching on from not far away.

By the next post I should have a bit more detail on the chicks. Once John had returned them to their box, he took a photo of them snuggled back together – there’s not much room in there:

Elsewhere in the wood, I am really pleased to see that the green woodpeckers have decided to nest in the same hole that they have used for the previous two years. It is only about a metre and a half off the ground and easy to get a camera on:

Last year we found numerous beautiful white helleborines in the wood:

We have been looking for them again this year but have only found a couple of small sprouts, nothing like the tremendous display of last year. We did, however, stumble upon a previously-undiscovered second patch of common twayblades, another type of orchid:

It is buttercup time in the meadows. We love this time of year when our shoes are yellow with buttercup pollen as we come in from the meadows:

There are over thirty different species and hybrids of buttercup to be found growing in the UK. The great swathes of buttercup that flower here in early May, particularly where the grasses are cut shorter, are all bulbous buttercups, Ranunculus bulbosus. These grow from a swollen underground corm that gives them some drought resilience, useful because they are found in dry chalk and limestone grasslands such as the meadows.

The taller meadow buttercups, Ranunculus acris, are now just starting to appear along the hedgerow edges as well.

Small copper on a bulbous buttercup:

Meanwhile vast numbers of oxeye daisies are waiting in the wings to have their moment of glory shortly.

We have had some rain, an event so rare of late that I feel obliged to mention it. As the first few plump drops fell after such a dry spring, a frog appeared seemingly from nowhere:

Having the soil softened by rain is really good news for the birds and badgers who need to get at the worms to feed their young.

It has been some time since I’ve seen all three badger cubs together and I fear that we might already have lost one of them:

The daily peanut feeding time remains a very popular event, eagerly anticipated by the badgers, foxes and unfortunately also by the magpies:

And here is a magpie with another of the slow worms. However, slow worms can shed their tails to distract predators and, happily, it looks like this might just be the tail of the reptile:

There is something very interesting going on in one of the bushes in the meadows. A rare wasp, Polistes biglumis, has made a nest in some wild privet. Rather unimaginatively, we are calling her Big Pol and have been keeping an eye on her to see how she is getting on. This species is usually to be found in high-altitude meadows in the Alps and Apennines but, in 2020, several individuals were found nectaring on flowers at Samphire Hoe Country Park just down the coast. But, so far as we can tell, this may be the first time that a Polistes biglumis nest has been found in this country:

A scientific paper was written in 2020, following the discovery of this species at Samphire Hoe. The authors speculated that a mated female may have been carried from the Alps on a tourist car arriving at Dover. This car’s first stop was then the country park for the occupants to have a walk around after their long journey

Big Pol spends a lot of time guarding her nest but, when she was away, I was able to take a macro photo into it, showing that a single egg has been laid in each cell:

These eggs will hatch into larvae in due course and Big Pol will feed them with chewed insect meat, particularly caterpillars. Then, when the larvae become adults, they will switch to feeding on nectar.

Small blue butterflies have arrived in the meadows:

Wall butterflies seem to be having a jolly good year here and there are many more around than normal. Here is a mating pair

There are also lots of these small but silly moths fluttering along the hedges this year. I say they are silly because the males really can’t fly very well with those ridiculously long antennae:

All across the country swifts are now arriving back at their breeding sites after their long journey up from Africa. Our boxes, however, remain resolutely empty:

As I anxiously check the cameras several times a day, I remember myself as a parent of teenage children, trying not to fret as I awaited their return from a Friday night out. Well, my children always rolled home eventually and I do hope the swifts will too.

We are involved with KLAW – Kent Landholders Assisting Wildlife – and from time to time visits are arranged to see what fellow members of the group are getting up to on their land. This week we visited a 200 hectare farm near Marden, south of Maidstone. It was in the Low Weald where the clay soil means that the land is often wet and is dotted with numerous ponds.

Only half of the farm is under agriculture these days. The rest of the land doesn’t lend itself so well to growing crops, and the owners are restoring it to species-rich neutral grasslands by natural regeneration, the spreading of green hay and by sowing Weald-provenance seed.

There is also a large ancient woodland there, which was blanketed in glorious bluebells for our visit:

The Wild service tree is a very rare tree these days and we hadn’t seen one before. But they do grow well in the Low Weald and there were several beautiful specimens in the wood:

Part of the woodland had recently been thinned and rides created. All this hard work had been rewarded, though, because a nightingale had just arrived a few days previously and we were serenaded by his song:

Over the course of the morning we were shown many rare and vulnerable plants that are being nurtured on the farm. One of these was the true fox-sedge, Carex vulpina. Clumps of this large sedge were growing in a circle around what is a pond in the winter. Now, in April, the water has gone, but these conditions are perfect for this very rare plant to thrive:

But it was the green-winged orchids that stole the show. Last year over three thousand were counted on the farm.

We came away inspired by the care and passion that was that was being put into the restoration of the meadows and wood at the farm. We also came away with a young wild service tree to try to grow here in the meadows. Or probably we should plant it in the wood? What a responsibility:

After we had left Marden and were making our way back up to Maidstone, we went through a village called Loose. We found this sign, quickly snapped on my phone, very amusing:

We are now on tenterhooks whilst we await the return of the swifts to the boxes on the side of the house. Will they have survived another migration all the way down to equatorial or even southern Africa and back?

In the photo above, the boxes at 1 are house martin nests which are regularly nested in by house sparrows. Box 2, the left hand side of the semi-detached box, has never been used. Box 3 has been nested in by swifts for the last two summers and four chicks have successfully fledged from it. Box 4 has been hurriedly put up this week. Last summer box 5 was being roosted in by a pair of two year-old swifts and we are hoping that they will return this year to raise young. Box 6 has only just gone up. Box 7, facing east, has often been used by house sparrows. We will also be playing swifts calls again this year from two further swift boxes in the wildlife tower on the garage. This attracted a lot of swift attention last year but we don’t think any bird entered the boxes.

Box 3 and box 5 are the boxes that had swifts in them last year, and now both have cameras installed in them. I am seeing on social media that swifts are arriving back at their boxes all over the country and I’m checking our nest cameras daily but nothing so far.

Dave spotted something quite exciting in the meadows this week:

This is the paper wasp Polistes biglumis. It doesn’t have an English name yet because it was only first accepted onto the British list in 2020 when some individuals were seen in Samphire Hoe country park just down the coast. Since then there have been a few more sightings in coastal regions of East Kent. In German the species is called ‘Berg Feldwespe‘ meaning ‘mountain field wasp’ because it lives in high meadows in the Alpine region. This is the second Polistes species to make it to the UK – Polistes dominula arrived in 2003

Our wasp in the meadows is a female and she is building herself a nest on some wild privet:

In their normal range of the Alpine meadows, the adults feed on plant nectar, but do take caterpillars and other invertebrates to chew up and feed to their young. Although several of these wasps were found at Samphire Hoe in 2020 and breeding was presumed, as far as we can tell this may be the first time a nest has been found in this country.

We have come across a Polistes species wasp before when we saw a very similar wasp and nest in the Vercors, a mountainous region of France, back in May 2022:

The wasp in the meadows is building her nest alongside the 85 metres of new hedgerow that was planted about five years ago. It is a mix of many different native species and it is looking rather lovely these days:

Some of the hedge has started to flower and bear fruit now, adding to the winter larder that we can provide for the birds.

Spindle is one of the species in the hedge and at this time of year every spindle plant along the length has several nets of spindle ermine moth caterpillars on them. Once the caterpillars emerge from the sticky webbing that is currently protecting them, there will be many thousands available to feed young birds this spring:

Birds are nesting around the meadows now and I am pleased to see tits going into some of our boxes. We enjoyed watching this woodpigeon through the utility room window. Both male and female woodpigeon share the responsibility of building the nest, incubation of the eggs and feeding the young. But it is the male who generally gathers the nesting material and brings it to the female. She stays at the nest and constructs the platform. The male stayed perched up here on the fence for quite a while – long enough for me to go off to find my camera – before disappearing into the privet hedge where presumably his mate was waiting for him:

I have seen the first damselfly down by the wild pond:

Male green hairstreak butterflies are highly territorial, engaging in fierce dog-fights with other males to defend their perches. The winner of the battle will return to his favourite spot, often one or two metres above ground in the hedgerow, to await a female. It seems unlikely, but a lot of this delicate butterfly’s adult life is spent in combat:

I have just finished the Field Studies Council online course ‘ Introduction to Spiders’. I have always had an innate adverse reaction to spiders. I think that humans must have evolved in a part of the world where there were dangerous spiders so a fear of them is written onto our DNA. However, having now completed the course, I know so much more about these intriguing creatures. I find myself viewing them differently – more as interesting biological beings that are an important part of an ecosystem, rather than letting my irrational knee-jerk response take over.

So it was in this new frame of mind that I viewed this tiny green cucumber spider (Araniella cucurbitina or A. opistographa) at work on her enormous St Mark’s fly prey. The little spider had woven a sticky web within the margins of the leaf and the fly had made the mistake of landing on it:

The baby badgers are starting to wander around without their mother now. It has been such a dry spring, though, and I am worrying about them. We need some rain so that the badgers and the birds can get at the worms:

I had a bit of a treat in the wood this week. Crouching down in the marjoram clearing to change the SD card in the trail camera, I noticed a grass snake at the side of the pond less than a metre away. I quietly reached for my camera….

As I watched, the snake entered the water and slowly swam away from me along the length of the pond:

There are tadpoles in this small pond again this year, although perhaps not for much longer.

In the next few days John and John the bird ringers are going to have a look in the tawny owl box. The infrared camera is in no doubt that there is something warm in there, but what shall we find?

I should be able to tell you by the next post…

This week it was time for the first monitoring tour of the year around the dormouse boxes and we were looking forward to it:

This time there was a little team of four of us going round: Dave as scribe, the bird ringer John as equipment assistant and with a special interest in the bird nests found in the boxes, his wife Clare as photographer and me as licensed handler. All these dormouse photos are Clare’s.

We found five dormice over the course of the morning. They are not long out of hibernation and three of them hadn’t started making nests for themselves. This one in box 3 was in an otherwise completely empty box:

The two in box 16 below were on a bit of moss but this would almost certainly have been brought in by birds:

The dormouse in box 9, however, had built a nest already. It was not a typical nest though, with those brown leaves rather than fresh green hazel leaves. It did have stripped bark incorporated into it though:

The dormouse nest in box 22 was small but perfectly formed with a beautiful spherical core of woven stripped honeysuckle bark and green hazel leaves:

The dormouse living in this box had survived a significant injury:

Between 40% and 70% of British hazel dormice die during winter hibernation and so the five we saw this month are already heroes having survived until spring. Let’s hope they now go on to breed and raise some families.

This April I am on a quest to see if scarce prominent moths are living in the wood. These moths only really fly in April and are always found in association with mature silver birch or downy birch which are their larval food plants. I ran the battery moth trap overnight on the edge of the large stand of lovely silver birch trees in the wood:

This was the third time this month that I’ve tried for the scarce prominent moth but I haven’t seen it yet. I did, however, get three other moths that are strongly linked with birch:

It is very pleasing to set the moth trap up alongside birch trees and then go on to catch a selection of birch-loving moths. Admittedly I have not yet caught a scarce prominent, but April is not over and I will keep on trying.

All is continuing well with the breeding tawny owls in the nest box, and discussions are underway in the background to organise the ringing of the chicks in due course:

I have seen squirrels, stock doves, great tits and blue tits looking into the box while the owls have been nesting, but this photo below was a bit of a surprise:

It had been bathing at the shallow pool that is in the same clearing as the owl box and I think it just wanted to perch on that sturdy horizontal branch rather than it being interested in the owls.

A few days later it arrived for another bath and then returned once more to that same perch:

A different buzzard with many more brown feathers was at a different woodland pond this week:

Buzzards are resident in the wider woods and I would love to know where they are nesting.

The green woodpeckers are continuing to show interest in the hole in the cherry tree but I haven’t yet seen them actually go in. As we continue to monitor the hole, we are seeing other things as well, such as this sparrowhawk on a fly by:

There are also green woodpeckers across in the meadows and a male has regularly been coming down to the wild pond for a drink and a wash:

This week John managed to catch him in his net:

Here is a photo of a juvenile green woodpecker’s tongue from Wiki Commons:

Whilst the green woodpecker rather stole the show, John did catch several other birds in the meadows this week, including a male blackcap to match the female that he had caught the week before:

I can now tell you that there are three lovely badger cubs in the meadows this spring. Their mother has taken them to a burrow right down at the end of the second meadow to the place we call the amphitheatre:

There is a lot of interest in the nightly peanuts at this time of year with babies to be fed. It has also been a really dry spring yet again so the badgers are hungry, being unable to get to the worms that should be making up around 80% of their diet.

Two of the foxes have mange and, as well as the peanuts, I have been giving them a remedy sprinkled onto honey sandwiches. But getting the sandwiches into the right animal is a game of strategy requiring exquisite timing. Put the food out too late and the badgers come charging out and chase the foxes off. If it goes out too early then the magpies dart in. I tie myself up in knots trying to get it right.

The foxes have just now finished the six-week course of the Arsen Sulphur remedy and so I have stopped it. We are waiting on tenterhooks to see if it has worked.

I have put together a gallery of some of the other birds that frequent the meadows but rarely get a mention here:

Sparrowhawks so regularly patrol the hedgerows and land on the perches that I’ve ceased to comment on them and a small group of extraordinary-looking feral pigeons have recently started to wait for the daily seed spread onto the strip. Several pheasants overwintered here and at least two still remain. These non-native birds are not really welcome because they will be hoovering up the wildlife, so we hope that they will decide to move on soon. A pair of herring gulls have adopted the meadows this spring and are also very interested in the daily seed and we love to see these characterful birds. There are always plenty of wood pigeon and stock doves around.

It is lovely to have the reptiles back sunbathing in the meadows:

And green hairstreaks have arrived:

Moth traps draw in moths from far and wide and are great for monitoring what species are about. But there is also something rather wonderful about finding a moth doing its thing in its natural environment. I like to see where they have decided to roost up for the day, attempting to hide themselves from the birds. How do they even know what they look like and therefore where they will be disguised?

An example of this is a broad-barred white moth found roosting on a bit of poorly-painted door furniture. It was indeed difficult to see – but how did it know that?

For a further example we return to the stand of silver birch in the wood. Another specialist birch moth is the grey birch button micro moth that spends the daylight hours hidden in plain sight on the trunk of a silver birch

This week I nearly missed a streamer moth roosting on a metal bolt:

I find this all completely fascinating. Every day during the summer there are many thousands of night-flying moths hiding themselves in the meadows and I rarely see a single one of them. So I have set Dave and myself a brand new project this year to specifically search for them and see what wonders we can find.

I finish today with swifts. On 2nd May last year we were standing at the Leucate migration watch point in the Languedoc-Roussillon part of France on the Mediterranean coast.

I have stumbled upon an interesting website that provides all sorts of migration count information:

I can see that, now a year on, thousands of swifts are once more flooding back into Europe over the heads of the birdwatchers at Leucate. This is very exciting but we are not quite ready for them here yet and want to get two more nest boxes up before they return. We had better get a move on because they are on their way..

We have had some really fine weather here recently and John the bird-ringer has been catching newly-arrived summer visitors in the meadows.

There is also loud chiffchaffing emanating from the hedgerows these days and here is the unassuming bird that is responsible for that:

The blackcap’s song is beautifully melodious. It’s the males that are singing, but here is one of the females that they are trying to impress:

Linnets are partial migrants. Many remain in this country over the winter, forming large flocks on farmland that has some winter food, but a significant number migrate instead to southern France, Spain and Morocco. Either way, lovely linnets have recently arrived back here in the meadows to breed this summer:

John also caught a pair of robins. The first one he ringed was a male but the second, when gently blown upon through a tube, could be seen to have a nearly fully developed brood patch. This indicates that she’s a female and should soon be sitting on eggs. This brood patch has a really good blood supply to keep the eggs warm:

As John was at work with his nets, Dave and I took the dog around the meadows with her ball. We were walking along the northern boundary when I heard a small commotion going on in the hedgerow. I peered in and was flabbergasted to see that it was a water rail, struggling to get itself deeper into the bushes as we passed by.

I did get a good look at it but unfortunately was too stunned to act quickly. I failed to get a photo before the bird worked its way to the bottom of the hedge and out of sight.

Here is a photo of a water rail from Wiki Commons though:

It is thought that around 3,900 pairs of water rails breed in the UK with the numbers boosted in the winter by birds coming from colder parts of Europe. But they are very secretive wetland birds, usually hiding themselves amongst reeds and are difficult to properly count.

I presume that the water rail in our hedgerow this week must be en route back to its breeding grounds in Continental Europe. They are strongly nocturnal when they migrate, so would probably have stayed in the hedge all day and emerged when it got dark to fly across The Channel. I positioned a couple of trial cameras in case it came out onto the grass in front of the hedge before it flew off.

Unfortunately the bird left the hedge that evening without emerging in front of my cameras. I had never in a million years thought that we would have a water rail on the meadows bird list, but there it now is, nestling in at number 103.

An alexander is a tall, thuggish plant, forming dense stands that outcompete native flora and is a real problem here on the East Kent coast.

For the first few years after taking on the meadows, we were naive and insufficiently vigilant, letting alexanders grow and set seed in the meadows in a most foolhardy manner. This photo taken out the front of Walmer Castle this week demonstrates what can happen when you let down your guard in this way:

A thick hedge of the hated plant lines much of the coastal footpath between Walmer and Kingsdown at this time of year:

By the time we woke up to the threat and took it seriously, we already had thousands of alexander plants growing in the meadows. So many, in fact, that it is impossible to dig them all up in one go.

The same cannot be said for the ones that flower deep within the spiky hedgerows though:

The unwanted alexander successfully extricated from the back of the hedgerow:

Our approach for several years now has been to dig up any alexander that starts to flower and, since January, I have been regularly patrolling with my spade. I have removed hundreds of them and, now in mid April, the plants that remain will not be flowering this year. I will continue to be vigilant for a few weeks more, but can tell you now that no alexander will set seed in the meadows for another year. The war is far from over, however, and battle will recommence next January.

It’s wonderful to have the invertebrates out and about again and how I have missed them. This week I have been trying to photograph some flying insects as they feed from flowers.

A bee-fly is a sweet little thing so long as you don’t look too closely into its parasitic lifestyle. It has a rigid proboscis which cannot be retracted:

Green alkanet has flower tubes and that are shorter than the length of a bee-fly’s rigid proboscis, so the fly has to hover away from the flower as it drinks the nectar:

A primrose, however, has a flower tube that is longer than the bee-fly proboscis:

Although this photo below from 2023 is unfortunately not in focus, it shows a bee-fly that has just fed on a primrose and its pale trombone tongue is still extended from the proboscis:

There are lots of cowslips in the meadows at the moment and this is another example of a very long flower tube needing specialised mouthparts to access the nectar. I have only ever seen bumble bees feeding from these, although I suspect that moths also do under the cover of darkness.

Unlike the bee-flies, a bumblebee can curl its proboscis away when not in use but in the photo below the bee is approaching a cowslip with it unfurled and ready for action:

The red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius), however, has a tongue that is less than a third of the length of the garden bumblebee, at about 6mm. This shorter length means they prefer shallower flowers and I have been seeing them a lot on dandelions this week. They can also bite holes into the sides of the deeper flowers to reach the nectar though.

I am a great hairy-footed flower bee enthusiast and now have six pots of Pulmonaria by the front door in the hope of luring these lovely bees into the garden so that I can admire them.

It is wonderful to have bees flying all around once more, but it can be so very frustrating trying to photograph them in action.

The reptiles are also up and out now:

Unfortunately its not just us that has spotted them and here is a slow worm in a magpie’s beak:

As we have been looking under the reptile sampling squares we’ve found a variety of small mammals, although they are fast and photography is again difficult. A nice bank vole here though:

I have run the moth trap several times both in the meadows and in the wood and have been getting some interesting moths, many of which I have never seen before. So far this year I have already added a pleasing nineteen new species to the meadows moth list and nine for the wood.

For their safety, I release the caught moths from the trap the next evening after the birds have roosted. When I went to let them fly one evening, I found that love had blossomed in the trap:

My rough calculation suggested that the tawny owl eggs in a box in the wood might be hatching over the Easter weekend, but so far I have not noticed a change in behaviour that suggests that this has happened. Several small mammals are being delivered to the box overnight but perhaps still only by the one bird:

These two photos below were taken on the same night, one at 10.30pm in the evening and the other at 5am the next morning. I would think that an owl wouldn’t need to take two baths a night at this time of year, and that this must be two different birds, one of which will be the female away from her eggs or young:

I have been seeing a nice variety of small birds visiting this pond recently including bullfinch, siskin and redpoll. Obviously not while this bird was there though:

A different pond has been visited by a buzzard this week:

There is a lot going on at this time of year and I have had to leave out many interesting photos to avoid this post becoming far too long and unwieldy. I do want to include these last two photos, though, where the good old trail cameras have managed to capture animals flying through the air:

I find myself more than usually busy with nature at this lovely time of year. I hope that you too have been able to get out and about to experience and enjoy the wonderful spring as she is gradually arriving.,

After a long, dark winter, it’s extremely heartening when everything starts coming to life again in spring. This year there is a very special highlight in the wood with tawny owls once more nesting in one of the boxes.

We are trying to get better photos of them but, with the female now on eggs, anything we do in the vicinity has to be really quick and quiet so as not to scare her.

It is exclusively the female bird that will be incubating the eggs. She will stay on them pretty much continuously for the 28-30 days that they take to hatch, with the male bringing her food. Having done a rough calculation based on when I last saw both birds out and about together, my best guess is that the eggs will start hatching over the upcoming Easter weekend.

There should be two or three eggs in the box which will be white and smooth and roughly the size of a golf ball:

Ideally the camera could do with moving a bit further back because the birds are not quite in focus but we don’t think we can do that now without disturbing her.

Lots of mice have been arriving by night:

I suppose it is inevitable that some of these rodents being brought to the box are going to be dormice, but it’s difficult to tell in the dark. I did think the thickness of this rodent’s tail below looked suspiciously dormouse-like:

We have now trained a second camera onto the box as well. This one is quite a long way away but it might get some good shots when the chicks start branching out of the box:

Every day stock doves come and forlornly hang around the box. I don’t know why they haven’t cut their losses, realised that the box is already occupied this year, and gone to look for somewhere else to nest:

The owls are frequently coming down to bathe in the pond in the marjoram clearing:

They are properly bathing, not just drinking:

Another camera is now once more looking at the hole in a cherry tree where green woodpeckers have nested for the previous two years. The birds have been inspecting the hole this spring, but so far haven’t committed themselves. The camera has been seeing other things, though, such as this hare going past on the track behind:

A burrow that was used as a fox den a few years ago has had a camera on it ever since, and it is interesting to see how many things stop by. Rabbits, foxes, squirrels and badgers are regular visitors and recently a polecat-like mustelid was also peering in. This week, however, it was the turn of an enormous buzzard who is very partial to a bit of rabbit:

The Common twayblade is an easily-overlooked orchid being yellow-green and less showy than other UK orchids. Several have now started to come up in their normal spot. It looks like the slugs and snails have been enjoying them as well:

Now that I have a battery powered moth trap, I have gone mobile! I am really interested to see what moths live in the wood and intend to do some trapping there this year. I set the trap up overnight this week well away from where the tawnies are nesting:

The scarce prominent is one moth species that flies in April and which I am hoping lives in the wood. Its larvae feed on mature silver birch and we do have a lot of these, so I was feeling quite optimistic. However, all positivity evaporated the next morning when we returned to the wood and found the trap completely empty. I will try again next week and will surely catch something then.

Over in the meadows, a pair of mallards visit our ponds at this time every year for some rest and recreation. The female duck is egg-laying and is weakened by this energy-intensive process, so the male accompanies her wherever she goes as her bodyguard.

Mallards can seem so ordinary and domestic when they are dabbling around on a boating lake, being fed bread by toddlers. But when they arrive here in the meadows the feel of them is very different, like a pair of properly wild ducks.

Last year a mallard laid her eggs at the bottom of my sister’s Berkshire garden. There were eleven eggs, each slightly larger than a typical chicken egg, so it is easy to see that the female would need to recuperate whilst she is laying them:

This year’s ducks have been spending large periods of time down at the wild pond. After an extended swim, they often get out of the water to do some preening:

And then have a little snooze:

However, it’s important that they always keep an eye open because a couple of minutes after the photo above was taken, this happened:

Foxes are perfectly capable of swimming but this one obviously decided that, once he had lost the element of surprise, pursuing them any further was unlikely to succeed:

The next day he tried again but with the same result and with the ducks still unscathed on the water:

I have to apologise about the state of the pond. For the first time last summer it developed some blanket weed even though we are always extremely careful not to add nutrients. The weed has unfortunately returned this spring and it is a most unattractive look. We are hoping that, if we ignore it, it will eventually sort itself out and go away again.

Up at the top of the second meadow, I see that the mangey vixen has had her cubs and is now copiously lactating:

It is always interesting to see what the magpies are finding to eat. Here is the ringed bird with a snail:

And here, unfortunately, it has caught itself a vole:

This year’s nest building is obviously reaching the final stages, with some soft lining going in:

The jay is a bird often to be seen around the meadows. They must surely nest in the vicinity but I have never had any indication of where that might be:

A female blackbird rejecting the advances on a male on the gate. He has managed to make himself look so threatening:

To see the ringed female kestrel, now approaching her seventh birthday and still hunting in the meadows, is another Easter treat for me:

Her ringed right leg seen below confirms that this is the same bird:

As we wait with bated breath to see if there are any badger cubs this year, I now have cameras on three of the entrances to the sett. This swirl of badgers is at the entrance to a burrow on the cliff:

A badger is emerging from a second tunnel, a relatively newly-dug one that opens directly up into the meadows:

This third badger hole below has had fresh bedding dragged into it this week so might be a contender to be the one where the cubs first appear. It too opens out into the meadows but is covered by a thick tangle of brambles:

Looking back at my records over the past ten years, I see that the earliest that we had previously seen a badger cub above ground is 7th April. But now, just as I was about to publish this post, I have some late-arriving news. The photo below is of the second burrow and, just visible in the bottom right, is a small badger cub:

I hope to have better photos by next time.

We have some of the family coming for Easter and I have been happily decorating the house with lots of eggs and other things in lovely pastel shades:

With the weather here currently forecast to be fair at the weekend, I wish you a very enjoyable and chocolatey Easter.

I went to school in Brighton for two years back in the late 70s and have had a soft spot for the place ever since. Now, half a century on, our son and his wife have moved to Hove and are loving it too. We went to visit them this week and stayed a few nights in an apartment close to Hove seafront.

On our first evening there, we walked east along the seafront to the end of Brighton’s Palace Pier. The essence of the seafront and of Palace Pier itself has remained largely unchanged in the intervening fifty years. The West Pier, however, was looking rather sorry for itself:

The West Pier opened in 1866 and a concert hall was then added in 1916. The pier reached its peak popularity around this time, with two million visitors between 1918 and 1919. However, visitor numbers then started declining and its owners could not no longer meet its maintenance costs. They eventually filed for bankruptcy in 1965 and the pier was closed to the public because of safety concerns in 1975. When I was living in Brighton a couple of years later, it was on sale for a mere £100, so long as you could then guarantee to spend the million pounds or so that was required to repair it. Sadly, this never happened and parts of the pier began to fall into the sea. Two major fires in 2003, thought to be arson, led to it being declared beyond repair:

There is now a golden spiral art installation on the seafront made out of twenty-four cast-iron columns salvaged from the ruined pier:

As we stood on the Palace Pier and looked towards the West Pier, the sun was going down at the end of the day:

And the seafront was alive with young people

Throughout the winter Brighton is famous for its starling murmuration where the birds dance in the sky before settling down to spend the night underneath both piers. By now these birds will have left for their breeding grounds but Dave and I still inspected with interest the pilings where they will be roosting again this autumn:

Jonny took a photo of the Brighton starling murmuration around the Palace Pier back in November:

We were on Hove seafront on the next evening of our stay and there was another amazing sunset:

Brighton is also famous for being the last outpost for elm trees in the UK. In 1967 Dutch Elm disease came to Britain on some infected elm timber from North America. It’s a micro fungal disease carried by the elm bark beetle which feeds on the wood beneath the bark, spreading the disease as it moves from tree to tree. As a result of the arrival of this disease, twenty-five million elms were felled nationwide in an unsuccessful attempt to stop it.

Brighton, however, took a different approach. They pruned out infected branches at the first sight of infection, set bait traps for elm bark beetles at the city limits and dug trenches between neighbouring trees to prevent the disease passing across by root contact. This, together with the natural physical barrier of the treeless South Downs to the north, the English Channel to the south, a prevailing southwesterly wind across sea rather than land and an early warning helpline has helped Brighton keep much of its elm population.

Other than in Brighton, only around 1,000 mature elm trees survive in Britain. Brighton, however still has around 17,000 of them, many planted in Georgian and Victorian times when the city became a fashionable seaside resort. The trees grow well on the chalky soil and in the salty sea air. They weren’t quite in leaf for our visit this week but, once we got our eye in for what the bark looked like, we were pleased to spot elm trees all over the place. It is a sad fact that we had never properly seen mature elms before.

The Preston Twins were a pair of English elm trees (Ulmus minor ‘Atinia’) planted about 1613 in Preston Park in Brighton that were believed to be the oldest and largest English Elms in the world. However, in the summer of 2018 the eastern twin tragically became infected by Dutch elm disease although it didn’t show any symptoms until summer 2019 by which time the disease had spread to the roots. A trench was immediately dug between the two twins to sever any connecting roots in an attempt to save the other tree and the eastern twin was then cut down.

Now, though, the eastern twin has returned, once more standing next to its remaining twin. The artist Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva removed and burned the diseased bark and then preserved the wood beneath, turning it into a sculpture called The Gilded Elm to raise awareness of Dutch elm disease.

The Knepp Estate is a 3,500 acre pioneering rewilding project lying twenty-five kilometres to the north of Brighton. After years of losing money trying to grow arable crops and keep a diary herd on the heavy clay soil, the decision was made in 2000 to stop farming altogether. Instead, roaming herds of longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and deer shape the land and the results have been pretty spectacular as wildlife has returned to recolonise the land in droves.

Enormous increases in numbers of critically endangered nightingales, turtle doves and purple emperor butterflies are often quoted as their most notable successes, but there is also so much more to celebrate.

On one of the days we were in Hove, we drove up to Knepp to walk some of the footpaths around the estate.

Looking out over the rewildling project:

Old English longhorn cattle create diverse habitats on the land through their grazing, browsing and churning of the soil:

Thorny scrub patches act as natural cages, protecting tree seedlings from being eaten by the herbivores:

Six raised tree platforms around the estate allow visitors far-reaching views over the land. I am very envious of all their many beautiful oak trees:

This second tree platform looked out over the River Adur that runs through the estate:

In recent years beavers have been reintroduced onto the River Adur, creating further habitat types and increasing biodiversity. Since 2016 white storks, once a breeding bird in Britain, are also being reintroduced. The storks first bred there in 2020 and the colony has been growing rapidly with 53 chicks fledging in 2024.

Some of the original reintroduced storks came from Warsaw zoo where injured wild birds are recuperated. Although they can now fly, they can’t fly well enough to migrate and they remain at Knepp over the winter. On our visit this week the migrating birds are yet to return for the summer, but we still saw four storks:

We also spotted a man-made stork nest on the roof of one of the estate cottages. It looks like this one hasn’t been used yet though:

Using my telephoto lens I got distant photos of the two treehouses that you can stay in on the estate:

This was of particular interest to us because the treehouse on the right is where our son Jonty proposed to his girlfriend, now his wife, Ellie. Touchingly, he was so nervous as he prepared to propose that he tripped over and fell on his face.

Although we ourselves would never choose to live in a city, I can completely see why Jonny and Hayley love Hove so much. It is a vibrant place with some beautiful architecture and many lovely shops, cafes and restaurants.

There is always a lot going on such as the men’s cold-water dipping group that Jonny attends and took Dave along to this week. The men meet on a Sunday morning at Hove beach for sea swimming, connection, and peer support and Dave found the whole experience very uplifting:

I think Dave’s arty photo taken from the Palace Pier as the sun went down is a suitable choice with which to finish this week:

We fitted quite a lot into our few days at Brighton and Hove but there is much more still to do, and we are looking forward to getting to know the city better over the coming years.